Wednesday, November 29, 2017

A useful explanation of the attitudes and behavior of some people, including many of the Progressive Left, is that they are addicted to grievance.

Normal people handle the normal events of life normally, including slights, unfair treatment, and plain old screwing over suffered at the hands of others. They ignore pinpricks, address minor wounds, and deal with larger injustices appropriately. They fight fire with fire.

Grievance addicts do not. Everything that happens to a grievance addict is a catastrophic offense, a crime against humanity. If a mosquito bites, clobber it with a sledgehammer.

GAs at best are a nuisance. At worst they use their grievances to accrue great power, which they wield to the serious detriment of millions. Grievance addictions explain much of the progressive left's actions, whether in or out of power. Grievance is what they do best.

BTW, the bucolic setting pictured contains four objects with something in common. The coffee table in the center is called out in the podcast. Hint: They are made of wood from a special source, as described early in the show. Give a listen and find out.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Too many people, in my view, go through life as a struggle against something.

Don't get me wrong--life IS a struggle at times, and you do need to fight your way through problems you encounter in your life. But life should be more than a struggle against something. We shouldn't live strictly to avoid negative things. We should be striving for positive experiences, positive outcomes.

Preppers, some of them, make their lives nothing more than preparing for disaster. Being prepared is prudent, but as the sole motivation for life it makes you dreary and one-dimensional. In this show, I explore the necessity of a more positive outlook on life, and the many benefits. And I talk about what it might mean to you and me to live positively.

Should the Church be a cultural vanguard, leading the charge? Or should the church be shelter from the cultural storm?

That depends, I think, on what's happening with the culture.

If the culture is moving towards God and His Word, then the Church, if it's doing what it should be doing, will be right there as part of the vanguard. But if the culture is spiraling downward, out of control and away from God, then the Church should be an anchor point, a place of shelter from the cultural storm.

What should you do if you find yourself in a church that is considering the issue of same-sex marriage, led by a minister who favors it? We talk about a real-life example in this episode.

What are the arguments for and against same-sex marriage? What is God's law when it comes to homosexuality and same-sex marriage, and how do we know that?

Monday, July 17, 2017

I recently came across an outstanding novel about economic collapse by Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles, A Family, 2029-2047. (It's been out just over a year, but I'm a little slow, what can I say?)

I enjoyed The Mandibles so much that I've devoted the entire podcast to recounting the story and how it compares to "The Collapse" that so many of us have been anticipating (and talking about) for so long.

Lionel Shriver is a well-known award-winning author who turned her considerable literary talents not long ago to the unsustainable financial problems facing the U.S. and the rest of the world. The result is a supremely entertaining and realistic page-turner that immediately lept to the top of my list of favorite "collapse fiction", a genre which will some day be compared and contrasted to the real thing.

Well, we jump the comparison gun in this show, testing The Mandibles against various expectations we have for the upcoming real-world Collapse, including:

Stock market collapse

Demise of the dollar as the world's reserve currency

Repudiation of the US debt

Confiscation of gold

Hyperinflation (or will it be Deflation?)

Widespread civil unrest

Aftermath and recovery

I know I say this all the time, but this really IS a great show! Give it a listen!

***WARNING!*** This podcast is loaded to the rafters with plot spoilers--but the book is such a good read that won't matter!

Monday, June 5, 2017

Big Medicine must be destroyed. And CashDoc is just the thing to destroy it.

CashDoc is a little bit like Uber for the medical business. CashDoc connects people who need medical care with medical care providers ready to serve them.

With today's high "insurance" premiums, and super-high annual deductibles, millions of people are spending their own cash on their own medical care. And those costs have gone up up every year, year after year, for decades.

CashDoc blows up the expensive "confuseopoly" of Big Medicine, and brings the advantages of open markets and transparent pricing to the little guy, the average individual or family consumer of medical care. At the same time, doctors and other medical practitioners can focus on caring for patients while avoiding the costly bureaucratic thicket of Big Medicine.

Combine CashDoc with a cost sharing mechanism--medical "assurance"--from organizations such as Samaritan Ministries, and you have the advantages of an open market coupled with affordable protection against unforeseen medical expenses including emergencies.

It's too bad that CashDoc doesn't exist today, but it's an idea whose time has come, so it's all but inevitable that someone will make it happen. When they do, we will have a viable alternative to the super-high costs and crazy incentives of Big Medicine (hey, it's December, and you've finally burnt through your sky-high deductible, how about we operate on that shoulder that's been bothering you?)

Give this show a listen, and let me know if you're ready for CashDoc. I am!

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

It didn't take long for Trump's opposition to crank up the impeachment machine, now did it?

Of course, it helps when the opposition comprises the media, establishment politicians, and the administrative state. These are rice bowls of solid neutronium.

When you're on a four-year trip to Mars you have to find a way to get along. Whatever happens--he keeps leaving his space socks floating around the bedroom, she keeps nagging him to take out the space trash--you still gotta live together no matter what.

Monday, May 1, 2017

Credit has been around for about as long as money has been, since the first caveman Wimpy promised to pay next Tuesday for a hamburger today.

But super-easy credit money, thanks to the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy, and gigantic quantities of it, thanks to banks too big to fail, is a recent phenomenon, and it has funded the transformation of industry after industry--not in a good way, of course. When you examined what has happened and why, the term "strip mining" comes to mind.

What could possibly go wrong, with millions of consumers maxed out on seven-year car loans, $16,000-per-family credit card debt, tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, and maybe a home mortgage to boot? And no problem, really, with major corporations borrowing money to buy back their own stock. And it's all good, $20 trillion in on-the-books FedGov debt, with about ten times that in unfunded liabilities.

Nope, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Everything is going to be just fine.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

While we'll likely never get it this side of the collapse of Western Civ, medical care should be an open market.

The problems with the current state of medical care in America are legion, beginning with government domination of the so-called marketplace of medical insurance, which for starters, isn't insurance at all, but a mechanism for fixing prices at nose-bleed levels, and transferring the responsibility for payment to someone else, including unborn taxpayers.

Regardless, ObamaCare is headed for the ash heap of history, and if it happens while Trump is still president, whatever replaces it will be called TrumpCare. What SHOULD replace ObamaCare? What would be the result? And what about poor people, who can't afford anything, much less medical care. Great questions, all, answered in this episode.

Monday, February 20, 2017

Nice to be back on the podcast airwaves after a voice-destroying bout with The Crud.

Meanwhile, the next round of skirmishes are well underway in the rapidly-warming Cold Civil War.

(Yeah, I know, in the last show I said we should ignore what's happening in Washington, but sometimes I just can't help myself.)

Just so it has a handy name, let's call the fight against the noisy opening of Trump's presidency as "The War on Trump".

How is this war shaping up? Trump is pushing his agenda, with a misstep here and there, but mostly moving forward at battle speed, with all guns blazing.

Trump's opposition appeared routed at first, but it's gathering itself and is now executing a coherent, though not necessarily winning strategy. What is it? And how have the last couple of weeks resembled the Battle of Dunkirk in World War 2 (pictured)?

Good thing there's nothing at stake, right?

Somewhere in the middle of all the action, I take a detour into the two ideological sides of the fight between what most call the Left and the Right. I call them the Voluntarists and the Compellions. Maybe not as simple, but more descriptive, as explained in the show.

Thursday, January 5, 2017

Cato the Elder, when addressing the Senate of ancient Rome, often used the phrase, "Carthago delenda est," or "Carthage must be destroyed." He and others of his time were getting a little tired of defeating the armies of Carthage on the battlefield, only to have them rebuild and attack over and over again.

Our Carthage is Washington, home to a relatively tiny cadre of elites who believe it is their job to control the lives of hundreds of millions of people they've never met and know next to nothing about.

Trump promises to "drain the swamp" in Washington, but between you and me, I have my doubts how successful he will be. My personal preference would be for the place to be vaporized by thermonuclear weapons, the rubble scattered by a thousand bulldozers, and the soil sown with a million tons of salt. Obviously that's not going to happen.

What can we do, as individuals, to neutralize the outsize and negative effect that Washington has on our lives? I cover a few practical suggestions in this podcast. Something to tide us over until the Sweet Meteor of Death or some other calamity strikes the swells infesting the Imperial City.
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